Absent the rancor, their collective contention boils down to this: Websites such as Upworthy are the modern heirs to the disgraced practice of yellow journalism. If, say, the Podunk Herald wanted to prostitute itself to page views, it could make things go viral, too.

Yet the strings Upworthy plucks aren’t all that pliable. As Betabeat’s Ryan Holiday notes, “They are not Gawker, taking aim at obnoxious people; Perez Hilton, knocking celebrities down a peg; or The Huffington Post, attacking politicians on both sides. They are not I Can Haz Cheezburger, making us smile with lolcats and otters. Making a … video blow up—especially about hot-button issues like gay marriage or homelessness or racism” demands both a big brain and a huge heart.

Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser has heard these criticisms and offers two rebuttals (as paraphrased by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson): “What special virtue is there in letting great videos, articles, and images fall into the Internet’s abyss simply because nobody thought of the right combination of words to unlock its audience? What’s more, when readers find themselves hating a headline picked by a testing audience and shared by 10 million people, whose tastes are we really objecting to—Upworthy’s or ours?”

So, how can you emulate Upworthy’s explosive success? As much as I extol click bait, here’s its dirty little secret: A click-baitish headline works only when it leads to share-baitish content. That is, it’s not the headline that drives virality. It’s the content. An irresistible headline might cause people to click, thus fueling a blaze of initial views, but to turn that flame into a wildfire, your content has to be irresistibly sharable.

You can smear only so much lipstick on a pig. Ultimately, even the most brilliant headline can’t camouflage content that’s crap.

In other words (last metaphor, I promise), even in 2014, content remains king. The difference is that the queen is now the headline. As always, the best way to a man’s heart is through his better half.

Jonathan Rick is the president of the Jonathan Rick Group, a digital communications firm in Washington, DC. Tweet him your favorite examples of click bait and share bait at @jrick.